Audience, the company specialized in voice processing is entering a whole new domain with its Motion Q technology. As the name indicates, Audience will now provide motion-related hardware like the MQ100 processor to monitor and process signals generated by sensors such as accelerometer, magnetometer, gyroscope and pressure sensors to name the well-known ones.
The goal is to detect all kinds of motion such as those induced during fitness and sports, but also regular motion derived from handset use like shakes, and even swipes or taps. This would allow the apps to be more aware of their environments and therefore optimized for a specific use at any given time. Audience says that its MQ100 chip can do that with less than 5 mW (milliWatt).
While it may be surprising that an “audio” company enters this market, it is interesting to know that the same type of hardware that accelerates audio processing can also be leveraged to process motion sensing. In some ways, both are a form of signal, and the Audience engineers have managed to leverage the research done in audio hardware acceleration to process motion efficiently.
And that’s why the new eS703 and es705 audio processors will also feature the MotionQ feature set. It’s great to see Audience expand beyond smartphones where they won prestigious contracts such as the Galaxy Note 2 and many more phones. I expect their handset business to continue to do well, but I’m very curious to see if/when their MQ processors will power wearable devices in the near future.